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The program is aimed at helping startups find their way onto the cloud via IBM’s rich set of resources, including the company’s vast global network of enterprise clients, consultants, Innovation Centers and more to rapidly build innovations, scale quickly and accelerate growth.

Through the new program, qualifying startups will receive up to $120,000 worth of credits to put towards IBM Cloud usage, giving them the instant infrastructure needed to quickly launch their businesses and focus resources on coding, building, scaling and bringing innovations to market. The program will also offer startups connections into IBM’s enterprise client base, many of whom consistently look to the startup community for new approaches to industry challenges, IBM said.

"The IBM Global Entrepreneur Program for Cloud Startups provides a comprehensive and strong network of resources to drive collaborative cloud innovation," said Promod Haque, senior managing partner at Norwest Ventures, in a statement. "By enabling access to IBM’s broad and fast-growing enterprise cloud portfolio and third-party cloud services built around open APIs, startups can now more easily build and monetize their solutions. More importantly, by providing a global path to the enterprise, this program can help accelerate the rate at which cloud startups can get to market and scale."

Further reading

According to a recent Deloitte survey of more than 300 global venture capitalists, private equity and growth equity investors, these groups have largely been investing in tech companies, especially cloud and mobile. As these areas continue to heat up, IBM is committing to providing startups with the tools they need to build and capitalize on the next generation of apps for the cloud.

As part of the program, entrepreneurs will be given access to the entire IBM Cloud portfolio built on cloud infrastructure from SoftLayer. This portfolio includes Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform for app development with more than 75 runtimes and services. This will help startups capture and leverage rising volumes of big data from growing mobile and social networks, Internet of things (IoT) devices and more.

“Using Pick1 with IBM Watson on Bluemix’s cloud platform enables a new evolution of computing, in which apps and systems interact with human users. This integration enhances the insight delivered to users, by allowing a deeper understanding of big data in natural language, as well as clear, actionable patterns,” said Paolo Privitera, CEO of Pick1, a Silicon Valley-based survey and social analytics platform, in a statement. “Watson APIs on Bluemix enable our technology to use big data to predict a user’s actions based on their personality traits and behaviors, and as a result, we are turning users’ opinions into behavioral retargeting.”